'In Ballyroe', poem.

Another published poem of reflection, 'In Ballyroe.'

In Ballyroe

Kilfinane, Co. Limerick

 

In Ballyroe I look at a roadside fence
below a lawned rise and rounded ship’s-bridge windows. 
Up the way other houses are snug to the verge
or ride the outwaves of the Ballyhoura hills—
down, a stream thins on between brows of marshgrass
which bind or loosen the south Limerick damp.
The town then, announced by a Church of Ireland wall
much-fettled, a finger post that says ‘House of Music’
and points to a martyr’s iron tears.

Before I was born I came from here
but I lived in places of soot,
of cold that unmakes the pulse,
in brown forever Sunday places
with curtains bunched in window gaps
and gates without sure catches.  I entertained
moon- and frying-pan faces, unlaughed lips,
huckstering eyes, voices that promised the length of the road
then ghosted away at a bend.

All the while, I guess, the church wall
breathed birdsong, the finger post urged music
on black windows, dogs with appointments
at town-end bins, the An Post van tight-circling
from Noonan’s pumps and coal.

I look again far up, far down.  A starling initiates
the mobbing of a roof.  Light flashes through my years,
dim or blinding, as in a drunken storm,
as in a message fizzed from wire to wire
that hides the odd pick of sense
in lengths and widths of a language
that has never found its country or its breath.